Maps, Flaps, & Infinite Wallpaper

Afterthoughts from our encounter in flatness

Feb 08, 2021

Little update, May 2024: the UPV is currently delivering an extended series of micro-essays on this topic (“set design that folds neatly away in the mind”). Subscribe now to receive them as weekly emails. - Principal Cole.

Dear Students, Alumni, Faculty, and Trespassers,

I’ll begin by thanking those who ‘attended’ our online New Year’s Day Lecture: Maps, Flaps, & Infinite Wallpaper. Thank you! And thank you to those who signed up to this occasional newsletter in the lecture’s wake.

A brief module description and references are now available on the Unfound Peoples Videotechnic website.

There are plans to produce further video workshops for our hosts at Slow Film Festival later in the year.

Today, I offer an off-cut from January’s lecture. A brief instruction about making the decision to build your movie from cardboard.

And finally, this email introduces a new feature: a link coaster. At the very bottom of the email, I’ll share some web links I’ve explored recently. These are recommended reading and not obligatory for UPV students. However, I strongly encourage you to follow the ones that catch your imagination, and study each from a filmmaking perspective.

New instruction: Excuses and Cardboard

Regular visitors to the UPV website will note the occasional addition of instructional texts. Here follows a copy of the latest. It was excised from the Maps/Flaps lecture due to durational restraints.

Short of money? Is that why you decided to use cardboard to create your movie set? Being short of money isn’t a good excuse for the creative decisions you make in the filmmaking process. But you can use “being short of money” as a building block to construct better excuses. Better excuses for your creative decisions.

Here is a useful pattern to follow:

You are short of money.
Make a creative decision based on (1).
Invent a better reason or reasons for decision (2).

Inventing reasons to do a thing you’ve already decided to do is a grand creative act. We call this act “post-rationalisation.” The craft of post-rationalisation is common in many areas of life. In fact, post-rationalisation is how many great cowards make it from one end of their life to the other without losing their minds.

In your daily life, fitting your post-rational reasons to your decision-making requires extraordinary feats of:

Rhetoric
Fact-bending
Good will

But in a film, you control the whole universe. You can construct your excuses any way you like. Filmmaking is a blank canvas for post-rationalisation.

What is the most convincing way to blend an awkward decision (such as the use of cardboard sets) into your movie? The most convincing way is to alter the physical and metaphysical laws of your movie’s universe. More: alter the laws of your movie’s universe in such a way that any other decision would have been impossible.

No audience will doubt you. No audience will scoff at your budgetary restraints.

Let’s follow the example of choosing cardboard to construct your sets. Perhaps cardboard will represent itself: “In a world where cities are made of cardboard.”

Or maybe cardboard will perform the role of conventional materials. Materials such as concrete, brick, and porcelain. This is called “casting” cardboard. Casting cardboard to play something else.

It is also possible to cast cardboard as an unconventional or alien structural material. In this case, the alien material might have cardboard-like properties within your movie’s universe. We call this type of alien substance “fictional cardboard-like material” (FCLM).

Fitting the movie to the excuses

In any case, you must realign the physical and metaphysical circumstances and laws of your movie’s universe to support the decision to use cardboard.

Here are some broad physical and metaphysical circumstances that you can introduce to your diegesis.

The movie universe occupies another planet where the built environment is cardboard or a fictional cardboard-like material (FCLM).
The movie universe occupies another era on Earth, in which cardboard or FCLM architecture is common.
The movie universe occupies a character’s mind. The character either:
- Has a low neural budget (inability to imagine more stable architecture). Or;
- Feels shitty. Or;
- Loves cardboard. Or;
- Only perceives in two flimsy dimensions. Or;
- Has watched too many cardboard movies, the imprints of which permanently overshadow her internal world.
The movie universe occupies the mind of the filmmaker or set designer. (Who said the films or the external built environment should be made of wood, brick, and concrete rather than cardboard or FCLM? By what authority?)

The circumstances in which you imbed your creative decisions must be underpinned by a substructure of meta/physical laws. For instance: a particular gravity; psycho-emotional climate; etc.

Finally, if you make the creative decision that your movie universe is built from cardboard or FCLM, you should also calculate the mechanics, laws, and feelings of the tree life in your movie universe. Or the life of the being or mineral from which your fictional cardboard-like material is extracted.

Instruction ends.

Snow

Kaori Oda is one of our most precious living filmmakers. Her latest, Cenote, is currently playing on MUBI. The link is in the link coaster below.

Thank you for reading. Mind your footing in the snow.

~Graeme Cole.

(Principal)

Link Coaster

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